Can I have my brain back now? I enjoyed the Olympics, and my impression is that most Britons did so too. Holidaying at home, I noticed people in pubs and shops delighting in unusual celebrities and unusual challenges, especially from the Paralympians. With Bradley Wiggins' success in the Tour de France and Andy Murray's in New York, it made for a satisfying summer of sport.

Yet I saw nothing to justify the hysteria, the sobbing with joy and weeping with ecstasy, of the London media and politicians. The grasping for national pride and pseudo-psychological significance exaggerated the event and cheapened the athletes' achievement. As for the prime minister asking the Games minister, Jeremy Hunt, to run the NHS "because of the Olympics", it was worthy of Caligula.

Mayor Boris Johnson's hilarious speech to the London crowd on Monday shamelessly upstaged David Cameron's. The latter had modestly suggested the London Games would be remembered "for hundreds of years" and showed Britain could "do great things … and take on the world and, yes, we can win". Johnson went berserk. He bellowed of a nation in paroxysms of joy, of orgasms on tube trains and songs on sofas, or vice versa. Both men shamelessly hijacked the games, acclaiming a nation on a shining path to collective recovery. They were like Soviet leaders lauding the virtues of higher tractor production.

Hijacking any cultural enterprise to a political goal is dangerous. Johnson should know that those who lived by the Roman mob died by it. He exulted in his uproarious jokes and ridiculed "the doubters and gloomsters", but he never mentioned his own status as gloomster-in-chief. Only six weeks ago, he was telling Londoners on the tube to get out of town since hell was about to break loose. They did. Johnson must have cost the London economy millions.

No one I know seriously doubted London could stage a successful Olympics, given enough money. The doubts were over value for money, given that it would be immeasurable. Britain does big events well, though in this case it needed American subcontractors at almost every venue. While Lord Coe showed himself adept at throwing public money at every problem, credit for the venues and the shows should go to Sir John Armitt's delivery authority and Danny Boyle's entertainers. But it was the athletes who triumphed, overwhelming the nasty taste of the International Olympic Committee, its ZiL lanes and fat cats.

The real Olympic doubters were the organisers themselves. Those who argued for a low-cost, more open games within the original budget were ignored. The organisers simply panicked. They tripled the money needed and capitulated to the IOC's demand for unique stadiums, and to the security lobby's outrageous demands for cash. The Stratford site is now being shut down, and those whose taxes paid for it prevented from seeing it before dismantling.

A tenth of the budget, almost £1bn, went on security – not to mention missiles, submarines, frigates and jets. Despite weekly leaks from the securocrats of "terrorist menace to Games", there was no hint of one. Cameron is now forced to claim that every item of this paranoid spending was value for money because "it worked". On that basis he should go everywhere in a tank, with machine-gun nests on every street corner. I am sure that would "work".

The Olympics were an enjoyable sporting event, well-delivered by those paid (handsomely) to deliver them. As the left has plausibly pointed out, this proves only that unrestricted public spending can work wonders. As during the Falklands, Iraq and Afghan wars, you simply tell the Treasury to shut up. Any amount of expenditure on the Olympics was permissible, even an extra £40m on the opening ceremony. There was no stringency or budgetary responsibility. It just went wild.

I love sport, so long as it is not made a sub-set of pop psychology. I can feel national pride, with due agony when England plays Wales. I was overjoyed to awaken on Tuesday to news of Andy Murray's victory in New York, as by Lewis Hamilton's in the Italian Grand Prix. But what moved me was the spectacle of talent and hard work rewarded. It was not Johnson's chauvinist glee at the humiliation of France, Germany and Australia, which bore uncomfortable echoes of Orwell's sport as war without guns, "bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness and sadistic pleasure". It is too close to totalitarianism.

If overlain with enough bombast, any public spending that yields no benefit beyond feel-good can simply be asserted as "worth it". Any questioning of its expense can be declared unpatriotic. The same is true of spending on defence. No sum is considered too great and no return too abstract. Like security, glory admits no audit.

Those not glory-besotted are thus entitled to ask why, if we can spend like this for the Olympics, we cannot do so for other purposes. Money was certainly pumped into the economy. The coalition government now obviously craves a post-Olympics economic surge. So if it can blow £9.3bn on sport, no questions asked, why not make similar injections into general consumption?

Or why not celebrate youth in other ways? Why not shower money on intellectually rather than physically gifted young people, give them facilities, invite others from abroad and set them challenges? We could call it a university. How about £9bn extra on that? Or will the coalition's doubters and gloomsters say we can't afford it?